Okay to be Racist!

So, talkingpointsmemo.com has the headline up that Obama loses working class whites to Clinton in a landslide.

What is interesting to me about this to me is that I think the Jeremiah Wright business has obviously hurt Obama amongst working class white voters, but not quite in the way most people think. Frankly, I think that the Jeremiah Wright business has given working class voters a reason to vote on their baser instincts. Namely, voting out of racism. Any squeamishness those voters would have had about Obama before could have been swallowed to vote for him in absence of the Wright controversy. However, since Wright has been all over the news, those voters can now say to themselves and the media, well I really don't agree with Wright, so I am not voting for Obama for that reason. In reality they were uneasy voting for a black guy in the first place, and are just using Wright as convenient excuse. The reason I believe this to be true is that if Wright was really as damaging to Obama overall as it appears based off Obama's loss amongst working class whites, then Obama would have lost whites across the board, and just not within that one subset of the white vote. Obviously, Obama hasn't lost support amongst whites across the board, so it leads me to think that the Reverend Wright business is operating only amongst working class whites for a reason beyond just what Wright has said. The intervening variable I believe is operating is latent working class white racism. The Wright controversy has made it okay to express that racism by giving it the veneer of reasoned argument of "well I really disagree with what Wright said."

On another note, I was listening to one of the things Wright said at the national press club about the way white kids and black kids learn and think. At one point, Wright claimed that white kids primarily think and learn with the left brain, whereas black kids think and learn with the right brain. I trust that Wright is educated enough to have read a study on this point somewhere. The problem with this logic, and any study designed to show this, is that it is impossible to prove. Well, maybe not impossible, but damn near. In complicated bio-chemical reactions like what takes place in the brain, one would expect to find some type of structure that leads to this claimed differentiation. However, I almost guarantee no such a morphological difference exists between the brains of white and black children. I suppose if one really wanted to test this proposition, one could try teaching children of both races the same topic and use one of them fancy machines (MRI? EKG?, I dunno, hence fancy machines) to see if there is any difference in the areas of the brains stimulated by that topic. I would be willing to make a hefty bet that there wouldn't be such a difference.